McNamer Bruce
Organization: TechnoServe
Year Founded: 1968
Country: USA
Website: www.technoserve.org
TechoServe provides strategic management and marketing services to poor families in Asia, Africa and Latin America who want to start their own businesses. Focus: Enterprise Development, Rural Development Geographic Area of Impact: Africa, India, Latin America, Poland Model: Hybrid Non-Profit Number of Direct Beneficiaries: 1.2 million (2008) Annual Budget: US$ 44 million (2008) Recognition: Schwab Fellow of the World Economic Forum Background Millions of people across the developing world lack access to food, clean water, housing, healthcare and education. Where such essentials are available, they often depend on foreign aid, creating an unsustainable and undesirable situation. Businesses, most notably small and medium enterprises, drive sustained economic growth by offering secure employment and new job skills, and injecting economic vitality into communities that can then afford their own social services. TechnoServe assists entrepreneurs throughout the developing world plan and manage their enterprises, find markets and financing, and overcome technical challenges. Today, TechnoServe has helped create or improve thousands of businesses, benefiting millions of people in more than 30 countries. Innovation and Activities For four decades, TechnoServe’s programmes have focused on developing entrepreneurs, building businesses and industries, and improving the business environment in developing countries. The organization identifies entrepreneurs and guides them in planning, marketing, operating and expanding businesses that are likely to succeed and help the poor. It accomplishes this by using world-class business techniques and input from strategic partners, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Peet’s Coffee & Tea, Nestlé and Google. TechnoServe then leverages lead entrepreneurs to grow competitive, self-sustaining industries. TechnoServe’s impact can be seen in the way it has transformed the cashew sector and the lives of hundreds of thousands of poor people in Mozambique. It determined that Mozambique could create a competitive cashew market by establishing small-scale rural processing plants located close to farmers; equipping those plants with the technology needed to extract premium nuts; and providing both farmers and employees incentives to produce a better product that yields higher profits. Building on the success of its pilot project, TechnoServe helped a dozen more Mozambican entrepreneurs to open factories and form a commercial association that will ensure the sustainability and continued advancement of the industry after TechnoServe’s departure. In 2008, these firms purchased US$ 9.7 million worth of cashews from more than 102,000 small-scale farmers, and provided jobs for thousands of people living in areas with little formal employment. Employees’ children, freed from having to help their parents with subsistence farming, can now attend school and further improve their lives. This successful model is now being replicated in other countries. The Entrepreneur TechnoServe was created by the late entrepreneur, Ed Bullard. Today, Bruce McNamer leads the organization, which has continued to grow and evolve over time to address emerging challenges. Bruce became president and chief executive officer of TechnoServe after building a career in the private and public sectors. He has worked as an investment banker, a consultant at McKinsey & Company, a White House Fellow and director at the National Economic Council. After serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay, he was eager to use his business skills to target poverty. He is now steering TechnoServe through an unprecedented growth phase and gets enormous satisfaction from seeing how TechnoServe’s dynamic, market-based approach transforms peoples’ lives in the developing world.
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